The initiative grew out of a visit Viji Murali, WMU vice president
of information technology and CIO, made to the Western Student
Association last fall. As part of her ongoing initiative to upgrade
customer service in the Office of Information Technology, Murali
asked what students most wanted from her department.

"The overwhelming response was that they wanted student
Web pages," says Kelly Penskar, project lead for information
technology development. "Viji returned from that meeting
and made student Web pages a high priority project. The group
worked with impressive speed to get this program up and running."

A large team of OIT professionals worked for several months
to create the system and the corresponding documentation. In
February, the office piloted the system with a group of tech-savvy
students who work in the OIT. After incorporating comments from
those students, the team took the project to a group of 250 education
majors who had varying levels of technological ability.

"For the second pilot, we wanted a totally different
audience," Penskar says. "We knew that our OIT students
had done well with the system, but we needed to test it with
a group more representative of the student body as a whole--some
of these students were novices. It was helpful to have observations
and feedback from both ends of the spectrum. Thanks to their
input, for example, we were able to make the process of posting
a page on the Web much simpler."

The Web page service will be available through students' "unified
accounts," which had previously included only e-mail and
Web access. Each student is allocated 10 megabytes of space on
the University server. Both undergraduate and graduate students
are eligible to create personal Web pages, and the service will
remain active for two full semesters after a student graduates.

Students are expected to post both personal and University-related
information on the sites. Faculty members caught wind of the
project, Penskar says, and some are already planning to ask students
to use their sites for classroom projects. And, of course, OIT
staff members anticipate that many students will use their pages
to post resumes and portfolios, similar to the system launched
several years ago by the Haworth College of Business. Personal
Web pages will fall under WMU's Student Code of Conduct.

OIT has developed a wealth of resources to support students
who want to create Web pages. How-to information, answers to
frequently asked questions, and basic templates are available
online, and most lab computers on campus are equipped with the
two major Web design software packages. Penskar calls the student
multimedia lab located at 3302 Sangren Hall one of the University's
"hidden jewels."

"We have this fantastic lab where students can go to
scan photos, enhance their Web pages with creative sound and
add graphics," she asserts. "The lab has virtually
all the equipment they could want, plus trained staff members
who can walk them through the process, if needed. And this project
is definitely a work in progress--we expect to receive a lot
of feedback as students evaluate what they do and don't like.
This is just the beginning."